Research is more difficult that it seems. It needs strong methodology and a solid mathematical knowledge. In my personal opinion, the most important aspect (and where most of marketers fail) is the main question that triggers all the research, the main WHY. Within the following article, we will try to focus in this important question in order show some ways on how to accomplish a healthy market resarch study.

By fail I don’t say that marketers don’t take this question into account, I just state that they don’t put enough time and effort on it. Within the following article I will go through some basics of research and some categories that will help the researcher to classify their problems/questions and which will trigger the different ways and methods that are commonly use to get to the famous ‘insights’.

Always start with a WHY.

To begin every single research I always try to figure out what I am expecting of it. In other words, how would I use the results. For example, it is very different a research to solve some pricing issues that product development issues. It important to understand what we want to do before jumping into the methods of doing research. This is what is called ‘diagnostic’. There are lots of types of definitions, but I always go for simplicity so this is one once I was given within some research course

Type I: Exploratory Research

This type of research is important in order to solve managerial questions that are not very well defined. Usually are given by hunches or vague insights. They often provide the context and data for further investigation. Some question we often solve are:

Why are sales increasing/declining/flat?

What people think of our product?

Do users understand our value proposal?

Some examples of Exploratory Research are Focus Groups, Internet Communities, among others.

Type II: Descriptive Research

Secondly, the descriptive type of research is recommended to understand defined problems in which we need to expand our knowledge.

For example we may need to understand:

Who are our consumers?

How to aggregate them?

How much they like our products?

How much better are we than a certain product of the competitors?

What is our Share of wallet?

What is our NPS?

This can be done by active data collection or passive observing behavior. The first group is based on surveys (for example with Qualtrix or Surveymonkey) and the second mainly scanner data (for example of Nielsen or Ipsos), mobile data or media planning such as radio, tv or social media.

Type III: Causal Research

Finally, the Causal Research is based primary in testing the problems in order to get to the answer of the WHY.

For example, we may want to address some of the following problems:

How would I increase my website conversion rate if change the order of two elements?

What if I offer some discount based on the location of the user? What about the segment of the user?

Which promotion is more efficient?

Are our price discounts increasing the consumers’ average ticket?

Which is the best way to monetize my app?

Some important fact we need to understand Causal Research. In order to simplify we can name the following:

Correlation: relationship between two variables.

Causation: one variable producing an effect in another variable.

Correlation is different from Causation.

To sum up, we must follow some important rules for this type of research in order to assume causation of X and Y:

Correlation: Evidence of association between X and Y

Temporal antecedence: X must occur before Y

No third factor driving both: Control of other possible factors

Most of this type is solved by testing. The most famous test is the A/B Test because its simplicity and actionable results. Lots of companies can help marketers to do it, in order to name some you can refer to Google, Optimezely or in case of mobile data set Leanimplum or Mixpanel.

As always, we really hope you enjoy our article. Thanks for taking the time to read!

In the following article, we will be reviewing some techniques to analyze and present data. These are very suitable for explaining compound metrics when the mix of single elements is taken into account. Especially, when those are defined by a weighted average using the Share of Market to ponderate.

How to compound metrics based on Share of Market?

In order to compound metrics that reflects better the effect of the single elements, we could use the weighted average instead of the simple average.
For example, if we want to calculate Purchase Intention for The Coca Cola Company (as manufacturer), initially we have two possibilities:

In the simple average calculation, we don't take into account the weight of single brands and we bias the entire metric. If we take into account some weight, the metric will be healthier in terms of reflecting the reality. It is not mandatory to use the Share of Market, but we will use it just as an example since the idea is to show how to separete this effect when measuring changes of variables within different periods.

With "Fi" being the value of the Purchase Intention for the "i" brand itself, and "Si" the correspondent amount of Sales from the period.
For more information about the Weighted Average, please refer to the following
link

How changes in Mix can impact on variables variations?

As observed in the following example, the average can change due to variations in the mix of Sales (weighting variable)

The increase of sales of Coca Cola boost the metric since this is the brand with the best Purchase Intention. This is a bit tricky since there is not any change of each of the brand from the company. As conclusion, if we are not careful this can lead us to think that Coca Cola Company is increasing it Purchase Intention,

How to separate the change of the variable from the effect from mix?

After the previous introduction, we now are ready to dive in the main paragraph of the article. The idea is to spot the real effect. By real, I mean the pure effect (or so) of the variable, separating and measuring the mix effect.
In order to do that, we need to order the spreadsheet in the following way:

To fill the grey shaded cells we use the following formulas:

To complete the example, here are some possible insights and conclusions about the methodology (not on the data, remember it is fake data).

In order to check the variation, both must sum up the same

The same analysis of brands/manufacturer can be done with manufacturers/market

The 0% of mix effect does means that this brand has evolved in the same rate than the market

As always, we really hope you enjoy our article.
Thanks for taking the time to read!

Did you
know that most of our talking is with ourselves? Did you know the importance as
marketers of targeting consumer’s unconscious mind?

In this
post I am going to review in a much more comprehensive and practical way some
ideas of unconscious marketing from Guerrilla Marketing – Jay Conrad Levinson.

Unconscious Mind (UM) vs Conscious Mind (CM)

According
to this author, our behavior is divided into Conscious and Unconscious Decision
Making Processes. The UM is in charge of so much more information and decisions
than the CM. When the CM can process at the most four or five things the UM can
analyze and process millions of situations and decisions. The most common
situation is the UM not telling the CM all the outputs of his decisions in
order to avoid an overload of the CM. Imagine that it would be impossible to
live if you have to pay attention to breath, to blink, to salivate or even to
beat your heart.

But don’t think
that our Conscious Mind is unnecessary or even stupid because in most cases (not
every case) CM override the UM decisions.

But we are
not here to talk of every system in separated. We must understand how they
connect. The main idea is what Jay calls the Internal Dialogue. This is how our
UM tries to talk to the CM. I mean, all the times we make our Unconscious Value
Equation, when we analyze common situations, or even when we have the famous ‘hunch’
or “Gut Feeling”.

UM is in charge of the Internal Dialogue

The voices
we hear in our head are totally normal, and do not mean we have schizophrenia. This is how our brain thinks, this is how it works.
This voices or internal dialogue is so normal that is probably that you can
hear it while you are reading this post. It happened because language is
actually verbal, and the writing is only the representation of a word.

The main
idea I want to send is the importance of generating this internal dialogue.
This mechanism is a very big opportunity for marketers because its influence in
the decision-making process. Taking your prospect into a positive state will affect
their purchase decisions in a good way. And you should use language in your
favor to make that possible. For example instead of advertising “Without a
security alarm, your family is at a risk”, you should say, “Sleep soundly in the
safe knowledge that you have protected your home and family”. Being in a positive state help to avoid buyer’s
remorse, and increase repurchasing behavior. Buyer’s remorse is other way of Internal
Talking that results of the contradiction between the UM and the CM in the
purchase decision. Often we decide to buy stuff that we know we don’t need but
we consciously decide to do it anyway.

Internal Dialogue to generate Trust

Other big use of Internal Dialogue in marketing
is that it gives better results in gaining consumer’s trust. It is much more efficient to let the consumer’s brain get or come out
with the conclusion we want to state than sending the direct message. The main difference is the trust that
we have to our brain vs the trust we have to the message transmitter. It could
take weeks or month of efforts to become trustable to the consumer’s brain. But
if we communicate “unconscious clues” to the consumer’s brain so it reveals the
same message by its own, it is going to be much more comfortable and confident
with the marketing message and it will probably turn into more committed
decisions.

Timing in Decisions

The author
explains that the UM works in a faster way than the CM, and of course with a quicker
response. The importance comes from the knowledge that is possible for
marketers to make prospects take decisions before they are consciously aware that
the decision has been made. This is actually the result of “marketing to the
unconscious mind”.

Also UM can
take decisions without consulting the CM, and gives the marketer a window to
work on.

To completely
understand the timing in UM vs CM, the author include a real story about a
Fireman Officer:

"A researcher tells the story of a firefighter in Cleveland who answered a routine call with his men. It was in the back of a one-and-a-half story house in a residential neighborhood in the kitchen.

The firefighters broke down the door, laid down their hose, and began dousing the fire with water. It should have abated, but it didn’t. As the fire lieutenant recalls, he suddenly thought to himself, “There’s something wrong here,” and he immediately ordered his men out.

Moments after they fled, the floor they had been standing on collapsed. The fire had been in the basement, not the kitchen as it appeared. When asked how he knew to get out, he could not explain it at all.

It took well over two hours of questioning for the fire lieutenant to piece together how he knew to get out. (First, the fire didn’t respond as it was supposed to; second, the fire was abnormally hot; third, it was quiet when it should have been noisier given the heat.)"

In this case, the smarter UM analyze tons of experiences of the lieutenant in just seconds to reach to the conclusion that there was a danger.

As a global conclusion we can say that the
importance of UM exceeds marketing purposes but of course we could and should use
them and take advantage to grow our businesses.

What do you think about this car?

It is often said that curvilinear shapes are more appeal to human being. It is based in some belief that we associate sharpness with danger and we get in a warning state, or also because we are surrounded with nature and all the curves within it makes us feel more comfortable in round spaces. Today we are going to analyze those beliefs and try to get them down-to-earth.We are
going to review the work of Vartanian (2013) about the impact in the brain when visualizing curves. It is actually well believed that curvature elicits pleasant emotions, but
it is very difficult to measure.

To reach
our goal, Vartanian ran some investigation using fMRI to understand what is
happening in our brain in terms of activations when we are exposed to these types
of curves and lines represented in the stimuli (in this case as architectural
pictures).

From a strictly behavioral perspective, the first insight
of the investigation is that the amount of curves was highly correlated with
the beauty rating.

Then the study consisted of presenting participants in a
functional MRI (fMRI) scanner with photographs of interior spaces that varied
in contour.

Neuroanatomically,
the results demonstrated that judging the beauty of curvilinear spaces was
associated exclusively with an increase in ACC activity over and above judging
the beauty of rectilinear spaces. ACC is part of Brown et al.’s core circuit
for aesthetic processing (Brown 2011 - Naturalizing aesthetics: Brain areas for
aesthetic appraisal across sensory modalities), and its activation here is
consistent with the wealth of behavioral data that point to the involvement of
emotion and reward in preference for curved objects.

Conclusion

Beauty and curvilinear contour activated certain regions (ACC) that
are strongly responsive to the reward properties and emotional salience of
objects. So take that in mind when you are designing stuff for your business
(from logos, products to even websites) to help yourself from a pure neuroscientifically
point of view to improve the impact in your consumer.

What makes you feel better, go running, meet friends, prepare nice
dinner, finish your work and watch a movie, or just only focus in one activity,
such as meeting your friends?

What give us more happiness, the joy of doing lots of things, or the
satisfaction of doing only one but more accurate and in a better way?

The investigations from Jordan Etkin, Cassie Mogilner(2015) reached
to the conclusion that it depends on the
amount of time we have to perform the activities we do enjoy more doing high
variety of tasks or just focus in one activity. The measure of happiness was
based on two questions: How happy do you feel right now? And how satisfied do
you feel right now?

Shorter the time is, we prefer focus. Longer the time is, it gets all
about diversity in the tasks.

So as we can see in the graphic, the threshold is in 1-hour-duration
activities. So according to this investigation, if we have less than one hour, focusing
in fewer tasks will give us more satisfaction. But in the other hand, more than
1 hour may be marginally you got more satisfaction by solving high variety of tasks.

It is all about the sensation of productivity. More accomplished tasks in the same period of
time makes people feel they are taking advantage of time. But nothing is free
in life (isn’t it?), changing activities results in energy and cognitive resources
spending. So people stress and loss productivity by switching their tasks. As
conclusion, shorter periods just do not put up for the cost of changing so it
is more efficient to focus in fewer tasks.

All of these insights are very important when it comes to organize the
schedule. “Although repetition can make workers more productive in the
short-term, the lack of stimulation eventually detracts from their happiness.
So within an hour, tasks should be kept consistent to increase productivity,
but across days, tasks should be varied to maintain stimulation and interest.”

Today we are going to discuss some important tools when it comes to analyzing human behaviors. We intend to state practical and clear examples that could be useful in everyday life. Although it has neuroscientific explanations we are not going to make use of them for the sake of the post.

TWO SYSTEMS

Let’s start with two experiments. First take a glance at the next image:

Here we can
see how our automatic mode is activated and working. We can make some very accurate
predictions on the image. The most important is that the man is angry. He is
probably yelling to someone in the cellphone. Probably the language that he is
using is not very polite. This comes to our mind automatically. And those
involuntary responses, predictions, decisions is what Kahneman define as System
1.

Now let’s
take another task, try to solve the next multiplication:

Here we can
see how the other system works. The answer, although you can get it, won’t come
directly to your mind. In order to get the exact result you need to make some
effort and attention. This type of thinking is slow, and infer a sequence of
steps.

SOME DEFINITIONS

This terms
were originally proposed by the psychologists Keith Stanovich and Richard West,
and will refer to two systems in the mind, System 1 and System 2.

INTERACTIONS BETWEEN SYSTEMS.

Both
systems are active in normal conditions but each one tend to be more efficient
in different situations. For example imagine that you are angry and want to
yell someone that is annoying you, but it turns out to be your boss, what would
the systems do?

System 1 is
automatic, respond to emotions and works in an involuntary fast way, so it will
yell but as the System 2 is aware of the possible consequences of yelling, so it
takes control and stops you from making the very big mistake (here we are not
judging the situation, in some occasions the correct thing to do is to yell,
but this is a simple example). To do it, Systems 2 requires efforts and
concentration.

Another
simpler example could be the situation when you hear a powerful sound, it
probably that unconsciously you turn around, and in order not to, you should
make a conscious effort.

The same
when you go to a restaurant an there is an exotic couple in the next table and
you try to avoid staring.

THE LOW EFFORT RULE

As we said
in the previous paragraph, each system is more accurate in certain situations. Kahneman propose
a rule of choice: our brain will follow the lowest effort way.

Daniel
Kahneman investigated the use of mental energy that involved both process
(Systems 1 and 2). He reached to the conclusion that System 2 requires much
more energy and effort. That could explain why when is possible our brain chose
the System 1 as it works in a faster, effortless way, and usually predict very
accurate in easy situations. But not always it is the best choice, and as we
saw in the previous examples when it was necessary, it tells System 2 to take
charge in the decision making.

I hope you
like this approach to Kahneman’s Systems and hope these one become new tools
that help you analyze people behavior.

Remembering is essential for our living. Can
you imagine having to learn to walk every single day? Can you picture yourself forgetting where the
bathroom at your place is every time you woke up?There is still so much to learn in this field
but we are going to describe some approaches and important facts on Memory and
Learning for business and marketers.Just to introduce you with a smile into the memory issues, some funny facts of 50 First Dates,

Types of
memory

In order to start this post I wouold like to show a brief chart that include the different types of the memories and the duration of them.

Within the
Long-term memory we can find a very important distinction:

Declarative:
is in charge of remembering facts or events.

Non-Declarative:
works in a deeper awareness level. It is retrieved without conscious or
control. For example: riding a bike or reading this post.

The most
important conclusion I want to take from the previous distinction is the importance
of the non-conscious memory. It drives almost all our behavior, and altought it
is still a lot to learn, most researchers are working on it. Because once we
can understand what people really like, (in this case, related to memory, as we
will see in the next paragraph in the Coca-Cola vs Pepsi Experiment) we will be able to deliver it rising the value for the consumer and embracing our brands above the competition.

How to
measure in a pretty simple way?

We can ask
people how they remember a brand or even how they believe they know it.

TOM: Top
Of Mind, it ranks the brands in the order from the most known to the least.
There are lots of variants in this method, but essentially they answer the
question, “do you know this brand?"

Subjective
Knowledge: This measure allows the researcher or marketer to understand how the
consumer believes to understand or know the brand.

Association:
It approaches to the question, “Do you feel our brand to be Positive or Negative?”

NeuroMarketing approach using fMRI

There is an
interesting research provided by Sam McCloy on how memory and past experience
affects preference.

Coca-Cola vs
Pepsi Experiment

The
experiment consist in two parts. First a blind test and then another one where
the consumer know the brand he is drinking.

Blind test
had no strong results (besides people often think they can differentiate Coca-Cola
and Pepsi), but when people knew they were drinking Coca-Cola most of them actually
prefered it.

As we can
see, there is change on preference just by knowing what are we drinking, and
according to the study it is related to the remembering of past experience
where having a Coke was more rewarding (thank you very much for messing with my mind Coca-Cola Marketing Team…).

To state
all this Neuromarketing hipothesis, we can see in the fMRI results the
difference between the blind test and the Coca-Cola test.

The main
conclusions were that during the blind test people feel more appealing the Pepsi due
to the activation in the Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex, that is actually a “reward
center” area.

But when
the consumer knew what he was drinking, the activation area change. Only when
the consumer drink Coke, the scan showed strong activation in the Hippocampus and in
the DLPF which are "center for memory and emotions". So besides people actually
liked Pepsi, they were more inclined to chose Coke based on the memory of past
experience and emotional connections.